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She built a toy empire while hiding a lifetime of existential depression
- tediousdemise 5y agoI don’t know this lady or her struggles, but the article paints a very clear picture of someone with childhood-onset bipolar disorder who has gone from manically creative highs to depressing lows. Strangely, there was no mention of it, aside from “relentless anxiety and depression, eating disorders, exercise addiction, obsessive-compulsive tendencies.” All of these are common comorbidities in bipolar individuals.
- ludamad 5y agoWhat's the advantage of labelled baskets of symptoms vs treating symptoms from first principles? Honest question
- tediousdemise 5y agoMisdiagnosing bipolar disorder as a purely depressive disorder can have disastrous consequences, especially if prescribed antidepressants instead of mood stabilizers. [1] [1] https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/news/20100601/bipolar-disorder-misdiagnosed-as-depression https://www.webmd.com/bipolar-disorder/news/20100601/bipolar...
- captainredbeard 5y ago> disastrous consequences, especially if prescribed antidepressants Viewed differently, this speaks to the extreme dangers of psychiatric drugs. They should be a tool (vital!) of last resort but are often used as a frontline therapy.
- tediousdemise 5y agoI agree. It should go without saying that you only get one brain. Fundamentally, anything that modulates the brain should be used with extreme caution. Although the brain is remarkably resilient, sometimes drug-induced changes or side effects can be permanent. For some, this may come as relief, yet for others, they may find that the solution was worse than the problem. As they say, caveat emptor.
- treeman79 5y agoEverything is depression. Had major brain fog problems. But was generally happy and good natured. Spent years seeking help, at every stage was told it was depression. Turned out it was a horrible disease that was slowing killing me. I imagine a lot of “depressed” people have an underlying chronic condition that isn’t being addressed.
- anonymouse008 5y agoMind sharing how one could go about testing for this condition? (This sounds a bit familiar)
- treeman79 5y agoGenetic testing for clotting. Autoimmune work up. Spinal tap for pressure. Make a list every symptom, and what affects your symptoms. Take it to every kind of specialist. Then keep repeating. Take an advocate. I would explain stuff, could see they had mentally written me off. The wife would start bawling. This would wake them up, and they would dig further. A neuro-ophthalmologist was reading my list. Looked up and declared I had Sjogrens. He was right. Now he missed the clotting disorder. Then have a clot in your lungs. Then you get taken seriously. That’s when they found factor 5 Leiden. So between the two my body and mind were trashed.
- spicybright 5y agoCrying wife is a good lifehack!
- whalesalad 5y agoI wish more people thought like this. Treating from first principles should be the way - but lately it is not.
- bosie 5y agodo you mind expanding on what 'treating symptoms from first principles' means? I have a hard time visualising how that works in medicine
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- ludamad 5y agoI guess first principles here just meant whatever you might do without the other symptoms in consideration
- LatteLazy 5y agoThe theory has been that if you could find a single underlying cause, you could just treat that, and then all the symptoms would disappear in one go. This would also let you treat symptoms that can't be treated directly (you can tranquilise away anxiety, you can't do much about hearing voices). That theory has largely failed as we can't even really agree which groups of symptoms make which diseases. Hence the constant changes to systems like the DSM. Full disclosure, I may be bias and I'm also an example: I have Major Mood Disorder. I used to have Severe Clinical Depression. Before that, I had Treatment Resistant Depression. Before that it was just Clinical Monopolar Depression (It's still called monopolar sometimes to differentiate it from Bipolar). My symptoms haven't changed. Nor has the treatments offered. But in the last 10y we've repeatedly renamed, recategorised, reshuffled etc just common depression. God knows what it's like in more complex, less common symptom sets... The BBCs Life Scientific podcast discusses this very question in this episode if you're interested: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000sj7c The wider series is also very good imho.
- tediousdemise 5y agoIt amazes me how complex the brain is. We are barely equipped with the tools to understand its complexity. An article I read earlier today on HN stated that the brain contains up to 11-dimensional neural networks. [1] I think we’ve been incredibly lucky to have the fields of psychology and psychiatry to fill the medical role, especially when the quantitative gaps in our understanding of the brain seem to be widening. [1] https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dimensions-discover-scientists https://bigthink.com/paul-ratner/our-brains-think-in-11-dime...
- hpoe 5y agoThis kind of constant relabeling and recategorizing along with everyone I know who works in mental health fields constantly diagnosing everyone around them is why I am skeptical of the entire field of psychology/psychiatry.
- tediousdemise 5y agoLook at it this way. Turbulence is an observable phenomenon that you may have experienced while riding an airplane. Modern fluid dynamics cannot adequately explain turbulence. Richard Feynman has described turbulence as the most important unsolved problem in classical physics.[1] We don’t dismiss fluid dynamics because turbulence is ill-defined, and we also don’t deny that turbulence exists just because we lack a thorough mathematical understanding of it. This is analogous to psychology/psychiatry and mental illnesses. If we had magical brain oscilloscopes that we could hook up to visualize every mental disorder, we’d use them. Until those exist, we must rely on qualitative and statistical approaches to provide treatment. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbulence
- cpach 5y agoGood question. A unipolar depression is very different from a bipolar depression in many regards. E.g. likeliness to eat less vs. likeliness to eat more. And a unipolar depression can possibly be treated and then be gone. (If the treatment works out.) If one has bipolar disorder, it won’t go away. One has to live with it the the whole life.
- mola 5y agoThat maybe important for a practioiner. But otherwise these labels don't have much meaning. Obviously her situation is unique. Although it may fall under the umbrella of some DSM definition, but the meaning there is only for a medical perspective and not "a human perspective". We cannot be reduced to some statistical artefact. We may statistically significantly share some common traits with other people, but it doesn't make us the set of these common traits. The model is not reality especially so for the DSM, which was built in a medically theraputic context. And should be taken as such.
- pmoriarty 5y agoMany therapists use the DSM only for insurance purposes, as insurance companies demand an official diagnosis before covering treatment. The DSM's role in therapy itself is highly questionable.
- guerrilla 5y ago> But otherwise these labels don't have much meaning. Hard disagree, the experience of somone with bipolar is a lot different than somone who's schizophrenic or only has major depression or generalized anxiety. Mania and the specific difficulties it causes for psychosis are radically different than what the others have to deal with and so is the general unpredictability of life (for planning and commitment purposes) and especially the types of effects it has on relationships. Each of the disorders have totally different profiles subjectively and objectively and different things they have to deal with. It's definitely not just a "statistical artefact" dispite the possibility of multiple diseases causing the same symptom clusters.
- mola 5y agoAnd these experiences usually can't be reduced to the symptoms list in the dsm. These lists are very simplified models that are useful for certain things.
- watwut 5y agoIf there is no official diagnosis, would it be ok for journalist to amateur diagnose her? Afaik, that is not considered acceptable.
- IG_Semmelweiss 5y agoA lot of these issues go hand in hand. I havent finished reading the article yet but this really struck me as narcissism with some othee commorbidities that you mention. What makes you think of BD?
- blantonl 5y agoThere is no way a 5 year old wrote this poem: The burden of myself Has grown impossible to bear Although rather than slip further Down this mountain of despair I will simply cry for help And hope an angel hears my plea Or I’ll not survive much longer And succumb to misery.
- tediousdemise 5y agoI had the same reaction, but then I remembered that child prodigies do exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_child_prodigies
- wizzard 5y agoIt's not strictly impossible, but it's highly improbable. If she was capable of writing that at 5 her whole life would have been on a different trajectory.
- imoverclocked 5y agoNot necessarily. Bright people are often unhappy/depressed/etc and then lack the appropriate resources to succeed.
- hchz 5y agoSylvia Plath was publishing complex poetry at 8 and was already showing the intense and dark themes she's become an icon for at 14. If you haven't dealt with what Plath or this woman has, or are some credentialed authority on early childhood development of exceptional children (or poetry), I can't understand why your speculation on this is worth listening to.
- brandonmenc 5y ago8 and 14 are not 5, and I'm also skeptical, but also not an expert in any of these areas. For comparison, here is the "complex poetry" Plath had published at age 8 (titled simply, "Poem"): "Hear the crickets chirping In the dewy grass. Bright little fireflies Twinkle as they pass."
- tamade 5y agoI'm sympathetic and glad she's better now, but the WaPo article reads like a puff piece with a heavy PR imprint https://homesoftherich.net/2012/01/toy-entrepreneurs-and-their-29000-square-foot-connecticut-mega-mansion/ https://homesoftherich.net/2012/01/toy-entrepreneurs-and-the...
- moonshinefe 5y agowhat's the point of the link exactly?
- meepmorp 5y agoMake sure you don't empathize with her, because there's no possible reason to discuss her mental illness in public except for PR purposes. You can tell, cause she's rich.
- elteto 5y agoShe owns a mansion, obviously she can’t suffer from mental illness! /s
- pmoriarty 5y agoI don't agree with that sarcastic statement, but I have been noticing lately that most of the really popular accounts of depression tend to come from really successful people, and I do wonder if their narratives might be distorting what depression is like for the rest of us... and particularly for those who are very far from being CEO's, famous actors/actresses, bestselling authors, etc.
- anoncake 5y agohttps://archive.is/HkkhU https://archive.is/HkkhU
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y ago> But when she did Bernstein was able to stop hiding — and hating — so much of herself. “My therapy has been in accepting the paradox that light doesn’t come without dark and highs don’t come without lows,” she says. “That if I want to be creative to the extent I am, then it’s going to have a dark side. And it does.” I think the big danger in trying to put a medical diagnosis on everything is that it gives a false sense of what is normal and abnormal. When I hear statements like xx% of people have issues with depression, one thought is, what if depression isn’t an illness, but just a variant of normal. Throughout history many, many of the great people, especially creatives struggled with depression. The Greeks actually had melancholy as one of the 4 humors and accepted that a certain percentage of people would be melancholic. Modern psychiatry and psychology seems to have a norm in mind and people who don’t fit that norm have an illness. See for example back when the DSM classified same sex attraction as a mental illness. Now we realize that it is just a normal variant of human sexuality and not an illness to be treated. Similar thing with ADHD. We are seeing 3 and 4 year olds put on medication. If you look at the life of Thomas Edison it seems he may have had what we would today call ADHD. If he had been medicated to be “normal”, would he have been able to do all those prodigious accomplishments? Sometimes, there can be great benefit in seeing something not as a disease but just a variant of normal with some advantages and disadvantages compared to the typical, and accepting it.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoThat's putting lipstick on a pig. Chronic depression is debilitating. A person without depression functions better than a person with depression.
- RcouF1uZ4gsC 5y agoBut Melissa in the article clearly isn’t debilitated. She functions better than 99.9% of all the people out there. In fact her depression, may actually contribute to what makes her so successful.
- nr2x 5y agoFrom a standpoint of value in a capitalist society she’s not debilitated if she makes money. From a standpoint of living a life where one is fulfilled and has peace of mind, money isn’t the relevant metric.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- throwaway481048 5y agoI know mental health is not HN’s primary focus, but the lack of attention to this story is (in my opinion) reflective of the state of mental health stigma in the US. Even with Bernstein achieving the ever-elusive “American dream”, conversation surrounding this particular article’s topic is wearisome to some and even warrantless to others. We need to do better. Publishing and discussing stories like this is just a start. Mental health is real, and if you are struggling, please know that you are not alone, never will be, and should seek help to make you as happy as you deserve. There is nothing wrong with this, just like the maintenance necessary for anything utilized routinely.
- okareaman 5y agoI have bipolar disorder and I would generally tend to agree with you, but this article reads more like a PR piece for her toy company. "Existential Depression" is more of a pop diagnosis. If you google it you'll see a lot of articles about gifted people and existential depression - it's the depression you can feel good about because it implies you are gifted.